If
our destiny is written in the stars, as some of Raúl Ruiz's films suggest,
it is a strange fate that has plucked him from relative obscurity to international
exposure with perhaps his 101st or 103rd film, an astonishing adaptation
of Marcel Proust's final volume in the Remembrance of Things Past cycle,
Time Regained.

A younger Raúl Ruiz, engaged by Chile's ruling Socialists as its film
adviser, planned to make a film predicting the overthrow of President
Allende's government by the military. Shooting was planned to start September
12,

\

Marcel
Proust

1973. But filmmaking was canceled when, on the day before, Gen. Augusto
Pinochet actually realized Ruiz's nightmare. Months later Ruiz fled Chile,
"just when the first filmmakers were being shot," he recently reminisced
in the Guardian. "The arrests at that point were completely arbitrary
and very chaotic - people were being shot just because they had moustaches."

Ruiz sought sanctuary in Paris where, over the next three decades, he
made more than 100 films of a rare and curious vintage. Some were made
in a week, some mislaid, others lost; they were about French politics,
cookery, fictitious 19th century painters or Communist multimillionaires.
Part Luis Buñuel, part Orson Welles (as Jonathan Romney has described
him), Ruiz has been one of world cinema's best kept secrets, a sorcerer
whose films mysteriously merge and multiply traditional time and narrative,
blurring the distinction between reality and dream while engaging questions
of fate and identity.

Carl Bromley writes
about cinema and politics for In These Times, Cineaste and The Nation.
He is the editor of the forthcoming Cinema Nation: TheBest Writing on
Film from The Nation, 1913-2000.